The traditional pressure in academia for faculty to "publish or perish" advances knowledge in established areas. But it also might discourage scientists from asking the innovative questions that are most likely to lead to the biggest breakthroughs, according to a new study spearheaded by a UCLA professor.

Since the 1980s, leading U.S. firms have announced massive downsizing plans in the name of maximizing shareholder value, but some observers are skeptical about how serious firms are in implementing these plans. Building on political theories of corporate governance, I examine how conflicts of interest and alignment among investors, workers, and top managers affect the implementation of announced downsizing plans.

Conventional research in organizational theory highlights the role of board interlocks in facilitating business collective action. In this article, I propose that business collective action affects the evolutionary path of interlock networks. In particular, large market players’ response after a collective action to the classic problem of the "exploitation" of the great by the small provides a mechanism for interlocks to evolve.

Community reactions against organizations can be driven by negative information spread through a diffusion process that is distinct from the diffusion of organizational practices. Bank panics offer a classic example of selective diffusion of negative information. Bank panics involve widespread bank runs, although a low proportion of banks experience a run. We develop theory on how organizational similarity, community similarity, and network proximity create selective diffusion paths for resistance against organizations.

The article focuses on the relationship between street vendors and local authorities in Bangkok. We examine the goals, the means, and the effects of everyday regulation of street vending. We document how the district administration produces and maintains informality by creating a parallel set of rules where street vendors enjoy negligible rents and little competition. We provide detailed empirical evidence on earnings, rents, fines, and rules regarding commercial real estate.

Several recent spatial analyses conclude the strong positive association typically found between neighborhood concentrated disadvantage and crime in cross-sectional studies significantly differs across neighborhoods. It is possible this spatial variation is due to within-neighborhood dynamics of continuity and change, as suggested by ecological theories of neighborhood crime.

How do people feel when they benefit from an unfair reward distribution? Equity theory predicts negative emotion in response to over-reward, but sociological research using referential standards of justice drawn from status-value theory repeatedly finds positive emotional responses to over-reward.